Crushing the FUCK Out of Writer’s Block, Part 2 of 3

Still can’t write? No worries because I’m still committed to helping you crush the FUCK out of Writer’s Block. Here’s a second tip for ya (and it’s kind of a double whammy):

Make it easy on yourself. Write 200 words a day. Every day.

I know that 200 words a day doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s the point. I think we can all agree that sitting down to write every day is hard enough without having the added pressure of hitting a specific word count. So keep it simple. Write anything you want. Give yourself a time frame, too. Try for 200 words in 20 minutes. Then move on with your day.

OR…

Write out a scene from your beat sheet. Just one scene.

If you missed the first tip on crushing the living fuck out of writer’s block, then the concept of the beat sheet might perplex you. So check out a brief introduction HERE!

If you’re too lazy to read the whole post, 😉 , then I’ll just say that a beat sheet is a bulleted listing of the what happens in your novel. Essentially, it’s a list of scenes.

If you get stuck in your writing, honestly, just go back to the beat sheet, pick a scene, and write it. One hour, one scene. Don’t worry about the crappy dialogue, don’t worry about purple prose. Just write. Then just walk away. You can come back an rewrite and reorganize later.

A hater’s perspective: So the haters out there (or inside of you) might think that 200 words a day or a single scene a day are not really going to help you out. “How can I get my novel done with such a small word count?”, is something you might be asking yourself.

My response?

200 words a day, every day, means that at the end of the year, you’ll have 73,000 words written. If you didn’t notice, that’s a novel. A 292 page novel, to be exact. 🙂 It can even be a novel and a novella if your definition of novels and novellas fall in the 50,000 word range and 25,000 word range! So imagine writing a novel AND a novella every year for the next five years… that’s five novels and five novellas, and a damned good backlist if you ask me.

So give it a whirl! Two hundreds words a day, every day, is so minimal and so easy to knock out of the way during morning coffee, a lunch hour, or on your morning commute, that it’s waay too tempting to pass up. It’ll get you into a routine, relieve the pressure, and most importantly, it’ll get your writing DONE.

Sounds like writer’s block is getting crushed to me!

So this is the second tip of five I’ll be posting throughout the month on CRUSHING the FUCK out of writer’s block. Do you have any tools you use to break writer’s block? Share them below! Write on, rock on, and of course, in the meantime…